Syrian rebels told AFP they found around 40 bodies showing signs of torture on Monday in the morgue of a hospital near Damascus, piled up in body bags.
“I opened the morgue door with my own hands, it was a horrible sight: around forty bodies were piled up, showing signs of terrible torture,” described to AFP Mohammed al-Hajj, a fighter from rebel factions in the south of the country, contacted by telephone from Damascus.
AFP was able to see dozens of photographs and video footage that Mohammed al-Hajj says he took himself and which show corpses showing clear signs of torture. The bodies were placed in white plastic bags or wrapped in white cloth, some stained with blood, on which numbers and sometimes names were written. Several of them appear to have been killed recently.
Read also: What was Saidnaya, the sinister liberated prison where thousands of Syrian opponents died?
Hope to find missing loved ones
Rebels led by the radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized power on Sunday, ousting former President Bashar al-Assad, whose family ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than five decades . At the heart of the system of government that Bashar al-Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a complex of prisons and detention centers used to eliminate dissent by imprisoning those suspected of deviating from the ruling Ba'ath Party line .
Thousands of people hoping to find loved ones who had disappeared in Bashar al-Assad's jails gathered Monday evening in the infamous Saidnaya prison, near Damascus, AFP correspondents noted.
Mohammed al-Hajj said the rebel fighters were informed by a hospital worker about the presence of bodies there. “We informed the military command of what we found and we coordinated our action with that of the Syrian Red Crescent, which transported the bodies to a hospital in Damascus, so that the families could come and identify them,” he added.
Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Association of Saidnaya Prison Detainees and Missing Persons (ADMSP), told AFP that the bodies were likely those of Saidnaya prison inmates.
List of torture perpetrators soon to be published
A few hours after the announcement of this macabre discovery, the commander of the HTS group, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, announced that the rebels would publish a list “of the highest officials involved in torture against the people”.
“We will announce a number one list which includes the names of the highest officials involved in torture against the Syrian people,” wrote on his official Telegram channel the rebel leader, who for several days has also been called by his real name, Ahmed al-Chareh. “We will offer rewards to anyone who provides information on senior military and security officials involved in war crimes”he promised.
“We will pursue war criminals and demand that they be handed over by the countries to which they fled so that they can receive their just punishment,” he also said, while Lebanese media indicate that several former officials of the government of deposed President Bashar al-Assad have taken refuge in Beirut, under the protection of the Shiite movement Hezbollah, one of the main supporters of the former authorities.
“We pledged to be tolerant towards those whose hands are not stained with the blood of the Syrian people, and we granted amnesty to those who were subject to compulsory service,” the rebel commander also wrote.
